I guess that started with Lefty Dreisell of Maryland back 40 years ago. When network cameras started shooting college basketball games a lot, they needed something to focus on between possessions. Coaches started learning that. Camera hams were born.

Except not one guy. He'd been around too long already. He knew all that frenzy and demonstration had nothing to do with teaching. And he taught better than anyone.

He also won more than anyone. A lot more. So, John Wooden didn't care what anyone thought of his sideline demeanor. He had his own code of behavior. Most of the time he just sat there beside assistants Denny Crum and Gary Cunningham. Once in a while he shouted an instruction through his rolled up program. Never did he obviously dress down a player coming back to the bench or act out from frustration against anyone on his UCLA Bruins.

Wooden knew 95 percent of coaching came from personal and team preparation, from setting an example of behavior and decorum and then demanding the same standard of precision from his players that he did from himself. And that's why he was the best coach this nation has ever seen in any sport.

It's occurred to me today that an entire generation of people under 40 really hasn't a clue about John Wooden or his UCLA basketball teams of the 1960s and early '70s. Oh, they've heard stories and seen grainy video. But they mean nothing. Sort of like stories about Babe Ruth now to pretty much everyone.

Well, that's kind of the point. John Wooden was Babe Ruth in a different way. His teams were the Yankees of the '20s, '30s and '50s, the Boston Celtics of the '60s. And then you run out of comparisons.

I'm old enough to remember what an event it was for Wooden and his Bruins to come to your town. They came to mine.

It was Dec. 6, 1968. The Ohio State football team was about to head for California to play O.J. Simpson and Southern California for the de facto national championship.

But that wasn't what I cared about that night. I was dialed in on the other Los Angeles college team in the other major sport. Primed for a rare look at a budding dynasty. Not one of those pretend types like the '70s Steelers would be. No, a real dynasty is when no one else takes power for a long time.

And that was Wooden's Bruins. They were about to embark on their third of seven consecutive national titles. That, friends, is a dynasty.

His senior center was what they used to call out in the cornfields where I grew up a phe-nom. His name was Lew Alcindor. He would become Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. He was 7 feet, 2 inches and not geeky. He was graceful as a young giraffe galloping across the Serengeti and as skilled a shooter as any star forward.

The game was an event. Actually seeing Alcindor in motion and not merely on the pages of Sports Illustrated was a novelty treat. Back then, college basketball on TV was a purely regional experience. National games simply did not exist. We saw Ohio State with the play-by-play call of plaid-coated homer Jimmy Crum on WLWC or we saw nothing.

The Final Four was not even called that. And if your station carried it at all, a fledgling syndicated outfit called TVS had to sell its blurry feed to one of your three local network affiliates. The networks themselves still had not even broadcast a national title game. TVS had done the prior season's Final Four in which UCLA and Alcindor blasted through Houston in a revenge match and then flattened North Carolina.

And yes, Alcindor was impressive. But what I really remember about that night other than seeing UCLA in those super-cool baby-blue uniforms with the gold-and-white letters and numbers was the passing. The Bruins barely dribbled. They just passed and cut and passed and cut. Bop-bop-bop. The timing was exquisite. And if they didn't get what they wanted, they stayed patient. But kept coming. “Hurry but don't rush,” Wooden had told them. They understood.

Ohio State, with future Cleveland Cavaliers Jim Cleamons and Dave Sorenson, played hard and well as Taylor's teams almost always did. UCLA won the game 84-73 and was on the way to an undefeated season, one of four Wooden would coach, eventually earning him the nickname, “The Wizard of Westwood.”

If you're 20 or 30 years old and you dig up a clip of one of those late-'60s UCLA teams on Youtube, you'll probably laugh. The basketball of four decades ago looks stunted and static because the ball-handling is primitive. Barely anyone even uses his weak hand.

The dribble-drive would revolutionize the game in the '70s and especially the '80s. A good college team of today would destroy 1969 UCLA because Lucious Allen and Kenny Heitz would not know what hit them. No backcourt of that era had any experience trying to check the sort of breakdown artists you have today.

But that's not the point. UCLA was beautiful basketball because of its geometry and synchronized motion. And John Wooden would have been just as great a coach today as he was in 1970 when a relatively starless team without Alcindor or Allen, both gone to the Milwaukee Bucks, whipped Jacksonville for another title, this one at Cole Field House in College Park. Because team basketball never goes out of style.

They said UCLA's 6-8 Sidney Wicks outplayed JU's 7-2 Artis Gilmore and 7-foot Pembrook Burrows III that day. But really it was Wooden and his iron starting five disassembling a traveling salesman type named Joe Williams. Wooden decided to double-team Gilmore and dared the other Dolphins to score. Gilmore took 29 shots and made 9. Williams had no other plan.

Still, Wooden's best teams were probably the next two years with the freshman and sophomore Bill Walton, quite possibly the best college player ever. Until they got bored in 1974 in Walton's junior year, the Bruins were unbeatable.

And still, Wooden's most memorable coaching job had not yet arrived. It would be his last, a no-name team that toppled a loaded Louisville bunch coached by his former protege Denny Crum and then Joe B. Hall's powerful Kentucky outfit, both in the 1975 Final Four. Wooden retired on the spot, speaking calmly to NBC's Jim Simpson in a post-game interview like a proud professor about accomplished students.

This was Wooden, coach of champions. But coaching by itself was by no means his life. More than three decades after his retirement at 65, the Wizard was vibrant – writing books, fulfilling nearly any interview request, plucking facts with encyclopedic recall and dispensing nuggets of wisdom such as his Pyramid of Success.

I have been touched by this pyramid. At several points, it speaks in a spare clarity that transcends the typical inspirational babble, cutting with crystalline thoughts. I always loved Wooden's definition of a building block in the pyramid – Poise:

“Just being yourself. Being at ease in any situation. Never fighting yourself.”

How simple is that? And yet, what else do you need to know?

And then there's Confidence:

“Respect without fear may come from being prepared and keeping all things in proper perspective.”

Proper perspective. How many of us are guilty of losing it so often? Or worse, never even attempting to acquire it?

Wooden was more than a winner. He had that perspective, learned as a farm kid from Indiana and honed as one of the best players in college basketball's early days as the leader of Purdue's 1932 national champs.

Here's one last thing that might surprise you: So many people seem to think that if you're going to reach the summit of your profession, it must become apparent by the time you're in your 30s, right? If you haven't learned how it works by then, well, no old dog can grasp any new tricks after that.

John Wooden didn't coach his first national title team, the Walt Hazzard-Gale Goodrich group at UCLA in 1964, until he was 53 years old.

The man never quit learning, never quit teaching what he learned, and never quit living a long and lustrous life.

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